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News from
 
triarchy press
–
Issue 4 -
Innovation
The Business InnovationAudit
For Bill Tate (formerly Head of British Airways’ HumanResources Strategy andPlanning), innovation is allabout the enterprise and onlyincidentally about the creativityof individuals.In this self-assessment audit,published under our CambridgeStrategy imprint, Bill sets out ways to understandwhich business structures and practices lead toinnovative capability for your whole organisation.Use the audit to assess, expand and release yourorganisation's innovating potential.10 questionnaires examine how well yourenterprise fosters innovation in the way it is run.Each comes with practical guidance and advice.
The Innovation Acid Test
Andrew Jones has studied atlength a number of thoseinnovative companies that arechanging the whole way we live–
Innocent Drinks
,
WholeFoods
,
Shanghai Tang
,
Google
and others.He also concludes that whatmatters is not individuals butpractices and procedures that transform the waythat people work together in those companies.He pieces together a pattern of distinctive ways inwhich these innovative businesses differentiatethemselves from traditionalist firms: frommanaging the workplace to talking to customersand recruiting and rewarding employees.
Inside Project Red Stripe
The Economist
’s controversialinnovation project, codenamed
Project Red Stripe
, caused quite astir for the 6 months that it ran.Andrew Carey was lucky enough tobe invited in to watch the team atwork and given the freedom towrite what he liked afterwards.Find out how they managed and what lessons youcould learn from their innovation team.
Generally speaking, innovation is great forconsultants and bad for managers.
Bad for managers
because it’s notoriously hard todo. Most innovations don’t work. Creativity is anarcane and unmanageable thing. Organisationsdon’t tend to follow through. You can easily endup with egg on your face.
Great for consultants
because you can dive intoan organisation and make significant, short-terminterventions. A cynic might say you can be a bitunsettling and disruptive, bounce some ideasaround, facilitate in a challenging sort of way andget out without being responsible for whathappens in the long term. (Though once you’veseen a really effective coach/facilitator at work,you know that the best consultants really areworth every penny).Innovation also tends to be counter-cyclical. Yes,when times are good and companies have moneyto spend, they may turn to innovation. But,inevitably, it’s when times are hard that thepressure’s on to find new products, services orideas to lead the business out of crisis.
The last fart of the ferret
This question of creativity under pressure is oneraised by Andrew Carey in his study of innovationat
The Economist
. There is some debate aboutwhether you should impose severe constraints(including time constraints) on an innovationteam/project, in order to wring the best out of them – or whether you should remove suchpressures as far as possible so that people can geton with being creative (what Harvard’s ProfessorTed Levitt called ‘give them the chance to showtheir fructifying stuff’).Carey quotes Taiichi Ohno, father of the ToyotaProduction System and an inspiration to manySystems Thinkers:
“In an interview… he reportedly likened creativity in a survival culture to the last fart of the ferret.When a ferret is cornered it emits a powerfulstench like a skunk, and employees, he said, when facing closure of the company, would come upwith some of their most creative ideas.”
In any case, please read on for more on
TheEconomist
’s Project Red Stripe, as well details of Bill Tate’s
Business Innovation Audit
and AndrewJones’s
The Innovation Acid Test
.
www.triarchypress.com
 
In
The Innovation Acid Test
, Andrew Jones takesissue with the conventional wisdom thatinnovation requires mavericks and insubordinationand that such people are not very good at businessin general or at being reliable employees. He says:
“I am interested in an alternative perspective,one that sits opposite the dominant‘innovation as insubordination’ view of theworld. This perspective, embraced in differentways by the seven firms considered here -Southwest Airlines, Google, Whole Foods, SASInstitute, Starbucks, Innocent Drinks, and Shanghai Tang - views innovation as aneveryday organizing principle of work itself.”
Jones concludes that there are two aspects tofostering creativity and innovation in business. Thefirst he calls the Human-Centred Enterprise.
The Human-Centred Enterprise
In this kind of humane organisation:
•
 
work becomes an end not a means to an end
•
 
the work-life balance is highly valued
•
 
there is an equal commitment to employeeand customer retention
•
 
businesses are assumed to be potentialinstruments of good in society
•
 
management is hands-off 
•
 
T-shaped people thriveQuoting Tim Brown in
Fast Company 
, Jonesexplains about T-shaped people:
“They have a principal skill that describes thevertical leg of the T - they’re mechanicalengineers or industrial designers. But they areso empathetic that they can branch out intoother skills, such as anthropology, and dothem as well. They are able to exploreinsights from many different perspectives and recognize patterns of behaviour that point toa universal human need.”
The A/D/A Paradigm
The second crucial aspect to fostering creativityand innovation that Andrew Jones identifies is anemerging ‘new management paradigm’:
“…one wherein the disciplinary assumptionsshift from the purely analytical and calculative disciplines of Mathematics,Economics and Psychology, to the action-oriented, experienced-based disciplines of Design, Architecture, and Anthropology. Thehub of the wheel that ties together design,architecture and anthropology is innovation. Anthropology is the source of ever-deeper insights into the… desires and aspirations of consumers and employees. Architecture is away of thinking about relating to constraintsand building new things. And design is both away of thinking about the world and amethodology for doing and building new thingsthat can transform consumer insights into new  products, experiences, business models and work processes.”The Innovation Acid Test
fleshes out theseideas with casestudies, stories andexamples from theseven companies thatthe author hasstudied.The result is aninspirational recipefor businesstransformation that’sas relevant in adepression as in aboom, as relevant in ayoung start-up as in a multinational, and asrelevant in the world’s emerging economies as inits old ones.You can read more about
The Innovation Acid Test
athttp://triarchypress.com/pages/book6.htmandorder a copy from your bookshop or direct fromwww.triarchypress.com.
 
The Innovation Acid Test
Google’s Marissa Mayer lists her 9 Notions of Successful Innovation:Ideas come from everywhere:
Google expectseveryone to innovate, even the finance team.
Share everything you can:
Every idea, projectand deadline is accessible on the intranet.
You’re brilliant, we’re hiring:
Founders Pageand Brin favour intelligence over experience.
A license to pursue dreams:
Employees get a‘free day’ each week. Half of new launches comefrom this ‘20% time.’
Innovation, not instant perfection:
Googlelaunches early and often in small beta tests.
Don’t politic, use data:
Mayer discourages theuse of ‘I like’, pushing staffers to use metrics.
Creativity loves restraint:
Give people a vision,rules about how to get there, and deadlines.
Worry about usage and users, not money:
Provide something simple to use and easy tolove. The money will follow.
Don’t kill projects, morph them:
There’s alwaysa kernel of something good that can be salvaged.
www.triarchypress.com
 
Innovation Rule 7for Marissa Mayerat Google (see theorange box on theprevious page) wasthis:
Creativity loves restraint:
Give people a vision,rules about how to get there, and deadlines.Much the same point is made by Harvard BusinessSchool’s Professor Teresa Amabile who says,
“creativity thrives when managers let peopledecide how to climb a mountain; they needn’t,however, let employees choose which one.”
By contrast, restraint was what
The Economist
’s
Project Red Stripe
did not get. Andrew Carey says:
“Project Red Stripe could hardly have been given a broader brief than ‘creating aninnovative and web-based product, service or business model’. It’s possible to see the firsttwo months for the Red Stripe team as beingspent deciding which mountain to climb.”
In the opening chapter of his provocative book, hetalks at length about how the team responded tothis freedom. Likening the team’s search for ‘thebig idea’ to Captain Ahab’s search for the whale in
Moby Dick
, Carey says ‘the big idea’:
“…preoccupied the team from the outset.Where would they find it? Would they know itwhen they saw it? Would they catch it? Would they be good enough for it? Would it be good enough for them? Would it be cool enough? Would they deserve it? If they found it, would other people recognise it? Would someone elsesteal it once they’d found it?”
Eventually the team settled on a business ideadesigned to help the UN achieve one of itsMillennium Goals (universal primary education).Discussing the extraordinary sense of power andpossibility that comes with ‘being able to help theUN’ do anything, Carey continues:
“To me it seems that this whale-of-an-ideawas sometimes too much for the team. Toomuch for any team. They tried to bring it backdown to size by playing with it: ‘Let’s divertthe Thames through Lichfield’, ‘Let’s makethe world square’. But still it became theelephant in the room, to mix gargantuanmammal metaphors…In the end, it’s a serious responsibility beinginvited to change the world. The whale-of-an-idea is an onerous beastie…”.
Carey spent time each week for six months withthe 6-person innovation team at
The Economist.
Remarkably, he was given freedom to report whathe saw with effectively no editorial control from
The Economist
.As Andrew says in his introduction (which,characteristically, appears some way into thebook) he was there in the role of corporateanthropologist and could have written about theindividuals on the team, or about teamworking andgroup issues, or about the culture at
TheEconomist
, or about the office environment, orabout the processes and procedures followed…In fact, he covers all those angles. He’s alsowritten the book rather like a blog (just as the
Project Red Stripe
team themselves wrote a dailypublic blog for some of the time and were alwaysvisible to the outside world via their webcam).So we’ve published it both as a book and as a blog(a new chapter gets added roughly every week).
Read the blog:
http://projectredstripe.blogspot.com/
Read more about the book:
http://triarchypress.com/pages/book15.htm
Order a copy from your bookshop or direct from
:www.triarchypress.com
 
The door to the room slams shut whenever someoneenters or leaves the office. The room shudders slightlyand everyone is jolted. By the time of my last visit inJuly the team are perfecting a device invented byJoanna. It involves folding a piece of cardboard andinserting it into the gap between the door frame andthe hinged side of the door, which serves to slowdown the speed with which the door closes andreduce the slam to a gentle pffftt.Wall decorations are almost non-existent. One or twopieces of fruit and a packet of biscuits occasionallydecorate the centre of the table. There is no other concession to homeliness.The drone of central London traffic (average daytimetraffic speed 6.1 mph/9.76 kph), punctuated by thewail of regular post-war-on-terror-and-current-war-on-gun-crime sirens, intrudes, as does the squeal andhiss of air brakes. Otherwise the outside world islargely excluded.
www.triarchypress.com
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